South Asia Citizens Web

Since the summer of 2012 Burma has seen pogroms, massacres, riots of unprecedented scale against religious minorities, the latest being on the 30th April. Few hundreds have been killed and few hundred thousands have been rendered homeless.

While people of Bangladesh were seem to reinvigorating the spirit of its four decade old war of liberation, the campaign launched by youth activists and bloggers demanding exemplary punishment to war criminals was gaining further momentum, with tens of thousands of men and women congregating at Shahbagh square, and Bangladesh’s largest religious-political outfit, Jamaat-e-Islami was further finding itself in a tight spot since the war crimes trials began, as many of its leading activists stood convicted for their crimes against humanity during 1971, came the news that Hefazat-e-Islam, a relatively new group based in Chittagong, bursting out on the centre stage of the nation’s politics with its demands which were at complete variance with this new mood. While the overwhelming demand was to ban ’politics based on religion’, the Hefazat brigade was seeking the exact opposite.

New Age - 12 May 2013
Women call for halt to religion-based politics Staff Correspondent
Women from all walks of life join a rally in front of the National Press Club in Dhaka on Saturday, demanding protection of rights of all citizens, irrespective of gender, race or faith.
Women from all walks of life join a rally in front of the National Press Club in Dhaka on Saturday, demanding protection of rights of all citizens, irrespective of gender, race or faith. — Indrajit Ghosh (…)

These two posters are part of a series that have been made over the past year to challenge the undemocratic ways of technocrats imposing their plans on India’s largest university in Delhi. The printed posters are being released on 12 May 2013 at Delhi University.

The perspective offered in our book is frankly different from what Indian and Pakistani leaders (and too many academics writing on the subject) have held. The authors are scientists who believe in a moral universe, where human life is to be valued and its destruction en masse to be abhorred. Nevertheless, while taking a position against nuclear weapons, it is not our intent to needlessly moralize. Facts are stated exactly as they happen to be. This is a responsibility that we owe both to our profession as scientists, and to our own selves, as well, for the facts of the nuclear situation in Pakistan and India are, without exaggeration, frightening, in and beyond the subcontinent.